“Heaven is Whenever” is the fifth studio album (2010) by Brooklyn-based The Hold Steady. Craig Finn & Tad Kubler’s previous band in Minneapolis was Lifter Puller. According to Brian Howe, writing on Indie review site Pitchfork in 2005,
“In Lifter Puller songs, everyone came to bad ends, no one was saved, and nothing was sacred. But in the Hold Steady, with its greater emphasis on religious wonder and dread, everything is sacred, and we realize that the booze and drugs and shady deals were always just a wrong-headed quest for divinity. As the characters flit from town to town searching for something ineffable, there’s a sense, beneath the mounting urgency and desperation, that redemption might always be just around the corner.”
The band’s fourth album, Stay Positive, was about aging gracefully - so this follow-up album is a useful follow-on to Slicer’s last post, on the march of time. Finn’s songs are often stories, populated by a cast of interesting, if depressing, characters - a little like Tom Waits’ downbeats - and at times they seem to suggest that youth is wasted on the young. Also in line with Slicer’s previous post, it’s reported that Finn & Kubler were inspired to form The Hold Steady by watching the documentary “The Last Waltz” (The Band). But they also were stylistically influenced by punk bands, especially The Replacements (if it’s not a contradiction-in-terms to describe punk as having style). Finn cites hip-hop as a major lyrical influence.
The Hold Steady’s lyrics are an interesting blend of Catholicism and classic American rock, and the mix has been compared with Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love” album. For what it’s worth (not a lot, as another practitioner of magic used to say), The Hold Steady are a bit of a hit down at Hogwarts, with Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe listing them as his favourite band.
Slicer admits to being a little late to the party, first noticing the band on the soundtrack for the 2007 award-winning movie “I’m Not There,” where they covered Dylan’s “Can you please crawl out your window?” Beyond comparisons with Springsteen, the sound on Heaven is Whenever is reminiscent to Slicer of Hootie & the Blowfish, and Barenaked Ladies.
Content-wise, the album is about struggle and reward, about understanding and accepting the place that suffering has in a joyful life. In interview, Finn likened it to the ‘no pain, no gain’ of going to the gym, but he said that the struggle is not just to get the reward – the two are intermingled; in a sense the struggle is part of the reward. Slicer is reminded of “Welcome to Struggleville” by Bill Mallonee and the Vigilantes of Love:
“I’ve been trying to negotiate peace with my own existence
She’s got a stockpile full of weaponry;
she’s breaking every cease-fire agreement
Whole thing is full of decay just as sure as I’m made of dust...
...They are building a new gallows
for when You show up on the street.
Polishing the electric chair
They’re gonna give you a front row seat...
Welcome all you suckers to Struggleville.”
However, this particular VOL song omits the reward after the suffering and execution... In fairness, Heaven is Whenever doesn’t really get too explicit about any reward for struggle or suffering either. The track We Can Get Together lends the album its title, “Heaven is whenever we can get together... and listen to your records.” Perhaps the hope of reward is bound up in the notion of community, and in shared creativity. Communities are often bound together in suffering, bound together in the struggle to survive. The song is a tribute to suicide victim Matthew Fletcher, from Oxford band, Heavenly:
“He wasn’t just a drummer, he was someone’s little brother.”
There is something fulfilling about having to put in a bit of effort to achieve something, struggling to better a situation. It’s not exactly a new idea - around 500 BC Heraclitus observed,
“It would not be better if things happened to men just as they wish.”
Or, as Jagger & Richards put it two and a half millennia later, ”You can’t always get what you want...”
Perhaps the great physician, William Osler, was closest to The Hold Steady’s message,
“To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.”
There’s nothing terribly original musically here, but that doesn’t get in the way of it being enjoyable, literate rock with memorable melodies, and well engineered sound. Slicer agrees with Andrzej Lukowski, who wrote in a BBC Music review, there is an “analogue warmth to their music that’s blissfully at odds with the compression-heavy world of modern rock production.”
The songs capture a certain seediness in society and there’s a suggestion of both pragmatism and distaste for how money is such a powerful motivator, and the problems with speaking your mind,
“Yeah, sure the stars are in the sky
but the money’s still here on the ground.
Man, if money didn't matter
Then I might tell you something new
You can't tell people what they want to hear
If you also want to tell the truth.” (Soft in the Center).
Yet there is hope.
Sometimes it seems that there’s a disconnection between what we feel and what we know in our heads is the case. Sometimes what we feel about life seems more real than the cold, hard, explanation offered by physics. It seems reductionist and incomplete to describe our experiences in just mechanical terms, whether electrical impulses or molecular interactions:
“Some nights she looked gorgeous...
We were living in the sweet part of the city...
Now it seems to me
Like distance doesn’t equal rate and time no more.
It’s like gravity doesn’t apply.” (The Sweet Part of the City).
There is also literate humour in the characters in the songs. One character says,
“The theme of this party is the industrial age
You came in dressed like a train wreck.” (The Weekenders).
In Our Whole Lives, Finn gently mocks the Catholicism of his upbringing
“Tonight we’re gonna have a really good time
But I want to go to heaven on the day I die
Going to make like a preemptive strike
Hit the 5.30 mass early Saturday night.
We’re good guys, but we can’t be good our whole lives.
Now father I have sinned and I wanna do it all again tonight.”
The issue is seeking forgiveness in advance of sinning. This seems to fit with Frank Wilczek’s approach (see an earlier post). Frank advocated, in science, acting first and then apologising later if you get it wrong. Sometimes if we think for too long, we miss the opportunity to get on with living – the paralysis of analysis.
But in the end it adds up to an acknowledgment that we don’t reach the required standard, and give up aiming for it.
It’s still life-affirming stuff. The Hold Steady aren’t saying life’s not worth the trouble. What they do say, in the song which closes the album, is
“This shouldn’t hurt, but you might feel a slight discomfort.”
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